Remind me?
A reader wrote to me a couple weeks ago in response to a recent column where I discussed my propensity to buy everything in sight when I’m at Costco. I had mentioned that I’ll even buy the 1,000 pack of water balloons in March even though I won’t be needing them until summer.
“Will you remember you have the water balloons in August?” she asked. “I put a sticky note on the (actual, paper) calendar to remind me.” And that’s when I knew that this woman—let’s call her Cindy, since that’s her name—was a kindred spirit, because I do the (actual, paper) calendar reminder thing all the time.
Cindy went on to share about a note she’d puzzled over when she found it stuck to her calendar earlier this month. The note simply read, “magnet key in sewing table”.
“Forgot we tucked it away but if lost we'd be in deep trouble,” she wrote. “It is a padlock for our gate that uses a specially fitted magnet to unlock (circa 1980) and every year we're afraid we'll misplace it.”
Cindy’s story reminded me of the time a few years ago when I was visiting my mom, Gloria, and my 95-year-old grandmother stopped by with her other daughter, my Aunt Sally. After chatting for a while, Grandma got up to leave and started heading down the hallway to retrieve her coat. After a minute, we heard her urgently shuffling back towards the kitchen, where we were all still talking.
“Sally, I just noticed this string tied around my finger!” she exclaimed.
Sally immediately clapped her hands together and said, “Oh, right! Gloria, can we borrow an onion?”
This is the blood that pumps through my veins.
As a very out-of-sight-out-of-mind person, I have to set reminders for myself all over my house. If there’s something in the washing machine that I want to remember to take out before it gets fried in the dryer, I use a dry erase marker to write “1 thing” on the dryer door. If I need to remember to double-check that the Tooth Fairy did her job before I head to bed, I’ll take lipstick and write “TF” on the bathroom mirror.
When I need Logan to remember to take something to work, I’ll set it on the laundry room floor directly in front of the garage entrance, so there’s no way he can forget it unless he deliberately steps right over it. I even once wrote “garbage” on a sticky note and put it on my teenage son’s forehead so he would remember to take out the trash before heading out the door.
I had to get really creative last fall, when I purchased tickets to “Wicked” as a Christmas present for our family and had to keep the tickets hidden for a month. They were in one spot until Christmas, at which point I wrapped them up and put them under the tree. Once the gift had been opened and “Defying Gravity” had been sung by my daughters at the top of their lungs about a million times, I gathered all the tickets back up and found another spot to keep them safe until this month, when the play was actually showing.
That’s a lot of opportunities to misplace important tickets. I used a clothespin to attach the tickets to a wire basket on my desk where they would be in plain sight, and then I set a reminder on my phone as to their whereabouts. As one final fail-safe, I flipped ahead to March on my (actual, paper) calendar and scrawled the location of the tickets in the square for March 11, the day of the show. The only thing that could’ve gone wrong was if I forgot to put the tickets in my purse before leaving for the show, but thankfully that didn’t happen.
Maybe someday I’ll attach my phone full of reminders to a string tied around my finger, just to be safe. Remind me to do that, will you?